Composition and World Literature
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
Reading Guides
Chapter 1
1. Who is Jimmy Cross?
2. Who did Jimmy Cross think about romantically and what did he do with her letters, other than read them?
3. Who was shot in April and what was his poncho used for?
4. What does “to hump” mean in the context of the book?
5. What did almost everyone hump?
6. What did Jimmie Cross think about whenever he looked at the photographs of Martha?
7. What did Mitchell Sanders carry and how much did it weigh?
8. What did Henry Dobbins carry and how much did it weigh?
9. Who was shot and killed outside Than Khe? What did he carry when he died? Who saw him killed and how
did he describe it?
10. What did all the men do at dusk once they were finished marching?
11. Who dropped like concrete, “boom-down?”
12. What good-luck charm did Jimmy Cross receive from Martha? Where did she get it from?
13. What was described as the place “where things came together but also separated?”
14. What did Jimmy Cross wonder about Martha and the afternoon she grabbed his good-luck charm?
15. Before they blew the tunnels, what were they ordered to do?
16. Who was described as, “Just a kid at war, in love. He couldn’t help it?” How old was he?
17. What was Ted Lavender doing when he was shot? Briefly describe what he looked like after he was shot.
18. What did Norman Bowker carry? What kind of person was he? What do you think this says about the affect
war has on a man?
19. What did Norman Bowker do right before he removed the thumb from the teenage boy?
20. What figurative (not literal) thing did the men carry? How is it described?
21. By nightfall, what would arrive for the troops?
22. Where did Jimmy Cross lead his men to after the chopper took Lavender away? What did they do there?
23. What did Jimmy Cross think caused Lavender’s death?
24. Who is Kiowa talking about when he says, “Like cement?”
25. What did the men do in times of panic?
26. “When someone died, it wasn’t ________________________, because in a curious way it
__________________.
27. “Men ____________ and _______________, because they were embarrassed not to.”
28. “They spoke ____________ about guys who had found _______________ by shooting off their own toes or
fingers. _____________ they’d say.”
29. What did Jimmy Cross do at the bottom of his foxhole the morning after Ted Lavender died?
30. What did Jimmy Cross remind himself his obligation was? What was it not?
Chapter 2
1. Where does Tim O’Brien live?
2. What would Jimmy never forgive himself for?
3. Who did O’Brien ask Jimmy about?
4. What happened between Jimmy and the woman at the reunion and what was her name? In two to three
sentences tell why you think things happened the way they did at this reunion.
5. On page 30 who does Jimmy not want O’Brien to mention anything about? Use two to three sentences to
explain why you think this.
Chapter 3
1. What was Mitchell Sanders using his thumbnail for?
2. What did Mitchell Sanders do with the body lice after he put them in a sealed envelope labeled “FREE?”
3. On page 32, O’Brien says, “There was something restful about it, something orderly and reassuring.” What is
he referring to or talking about in this passage? In two to three sentences explain why you felt it was “restful”
or “reassuring.”
4. How old is Tim O’Brien?
5. As O’Brien sits on his typewriter “star[ing] through [his] words,” what does he watch?
6. What never stops happening? In two to three sentences explain what O’Brien means by this.
7. What happened to old poppa-san once he was done guiding the men through the mine fields and the choppers
came?
8. What ate away at the important organs?
9. What is Norman Bowker’s one wish?
10. What happened to Ted Lavender’s orphan puppy that he took in?
11. What was the average age in O’Brien’s platoon?
12. What does O’Brien say stories are for?
Chapter 4
1. Why has O’Brien never told this story before?
2. Why is he telling the story?
5. What happened to O’Brien after he graduated from Macalestar College in 1968? How old was he?
8. What was the only certainty that summer for O’Brien?
14. “It couldn’t happen. I was __________. I had the world dicked – Phi Beta Kappa and summa
cum laude and ______________ of the student body and a _________________________ for grad
studies at ________________.
16. What does O’Brien mean by “precious fluids” on page 42?
20. “I did not want ______________. Not ever. But certainly not then, not there, not
__________________.”
21. What did O’Brien feel spreading inside him like “weeds?”
23. Other than the war, what did O’Brien fear?
28. What was the name of the man who opened the door for O’Brien, described as being “the hero of
[his] life?”
29. Where did O’Brien stay? How long did he stay there?
33. What was the “emergency fund?”
35. Where did Elroy Berdahl take O’Brien to fish?
36. Why did O’Brien think Elroy took him to fish where he did?
39. “My whole ______________ seemed to _______________ into the river.”
41. “They were all whooping and chanting and urging me ________________________ or the other.”
42. I would go to the war – I would _________ and maybe __________ - because
_____________________________.
Chapter 5
1. Who got into a fistfight at LZ Gator? What was it over?
2. Jensen couldn’t relax because he was fighting two different wars. What were these two wars?
3. Why did Lee Strunk say things were square?
Chapter 6
1. What did Dave Jensen and Lee Strunk learn to do?
2. What would Jensen or Strunk do for the other if one of them got a “wheelchair wound?”
3. What happened to Strunk at the end of chapter 6?
Chapter 7
1. What did everyone call Bob Kiley?
2. Who did he write a letter to?
3. What does Rat almost do while writing this letter?
4. What did Rat’s friend fish with?
5. How good of a friend was he to Rat?
6. What happens after Rat mails the letter?
7. “A true war story is never ____________.”
8. What is it difficult to do in a true war story?
9. What do the six guys on a listening-post operation do when they can’t cope and lose it?
10. “The whole war is right there in _______________________. It says everything _______________________
________________... It says, poor bastard, you’ll never know – wrong frequency – you don’t even want
__________________________.”
11. What does Mitchell Sanders say the moral to his story is?
12. What did Rat do to the baby buffalo first?
13. What did he do to it next? What was he doing after?
14. What is the “Garden of Evil?”
15. What is war another name for?
16. What was Mitchell Sanders right about?
17. “Right spills over into wrong. _________________ blends into ________________, love into hate, ugliness
into beauty, _________ into _________________, civility into savagery.”
18. What was Dave Jensen doing while O’Brien was cleaning Curt Lemon out of the tree?
Chapter 8
1. What role did Curt Lemon play?
2. Why did Curt Lemon faint?
3. What eventually made him better, “all smiles?”
Chapter 9
1. What did Rat have a reputation of doing?
2. Who challenges Rat on the basic premise of the story?
3. Who was, “just a kid, just barely out of high school?
4. Predict the definition of “RFs.”
5. Predict the definition of “PFs.”
6. Predict the definition of “ARVN.”
7. When Rat Kiley arrived who was using the compound at Tra Bong as a base of operations?
8. Who first brought up the “tantalizing possibility” of bringing a girl to Tra Bong?
9. Whose girlfriend showed up six weeks after the idea of bringing a girl to Tra Bong came up?
10. How old was the character above’s girlfriend? What was her name?
11. What did he and his girlfriend know since the sixth grade?
12. Where did the girlfriend want her boyfriend to take her? What was his first response?
13. What was she not afraid to do? How did her face look in times of action?
14. Why did her body seem foreign to her boyfriend now?
15. When the boyfriend notices that his girlfriend has not come home, what does he think she is doing? Where was
she, actually?
16. Where was his girlfriend all night long, other than the second answer above?
17. “A model of togetherness, it seemed. And yet at close range their faces showed the _______________. Too
_______________, too _______________.
18. Who was the seventh silhouette of on page 105?
19. How could rat tell that the girlfriend “wasn’t even the same person no more?”
20. What hit the soldiers first when they entered the “Greenies” hootch?
21. What was on a post at the rear of the hootch?
22. What did the poster above the stack of bones say? What might this imply the types of bones are under the
poster?
23. What was strange about the necklace the girlfriend was wearing?
24. “Man, you must be deaf. _______________ already _______________.”
25. Who took a greedy pleasure in night patrols?
26. “It was as if she were ______________________________ out in the bush, or in her head, inviting it to show
itself, a curious game of ______________________________ that was played out in the dense terrain of a
_______________.
Chapter 10
1. “_______________ was a good man, a superb soldier, but _______________ was not his strong suit.”
2. What did Henry Dobbins wrap around his neck before heading out on ambush? What (what did he think they
were)?
3. What happened near the end of October? Did Dobbins stop wearing his good luck charm?
Chapter 11
1. What did they use as a base of operations for?
2. Who took a special liking for Henry Dobbins?
3. What was Henry Dobbins also known as (AKA)?
4. What does Henry Dobbins want to do after the war?
Chapter 12
1. “His _______________ was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth _______________, his one eye was shut, his
other eye was a _______________, hi eyebrows were thin and arched like a woman’s, his nose was undamaged,
there was a _______________ at the lobe of one ear, his clean black hair was swept upward into a cowlick at
the rear of the skull, his forehead was lightly freckled, his fingernails were _______________, the skin at his
left cheek was _______________, there was a butterfly on his chin, his neck was _______________ and the
blood there was thick and shinny and it was this wound that _______________.”
2. What would “he” have been taught about defending the land?
3. Who says, “On the dead test, this particular individual gets A-plus?”
4. Who tries to console Tim after he kills the twenty year old soldier?
5. What would the young man not have wanted to be?
6. How many words does Tim O’Brien speak in this chapter?
Chapter 13
1. What is the name of Tim O’Brien’s daughter?
2. What does Tim O’Brien hope his daughter will ask again someday?
3. How did Tim O’Brien kill the man?
4.
“It was entirely _______________. I did not _______________ the young man; I did not see him as the
_______________; I did not _______________ of _______________ or _______________ or
_______________.”
5. Right as it occurred to Tim O’Brien that the man would die, what did Tim want to do?
6. Now and then when Tim O’Brien is looking at a newspaper, what does he look up and see?
Chapter 14
1. How old was the girl that was dancing?
2. What happened to her family?
3. What did the girl do, or what was she doing, when they brought her family out?
4. Who mocked the girls dancing?
5. What did Henry Dobbins do to this person due to his mockery?
Chapter 15
1. Who had the main character of this chapter driven around the lake with back in high school?
2. What did the lake represent? What was it a source of?
3. How long would it take a slow car to travel around the lake?
4. Who had caught an ear infection that almost kept him out of the war?
5. Who or what drowned Norman Bowker’s friend, Max Arnold?
6. What were most of Norman Bowker’s other friends doing?
7. What is Sally Kramer’s name now? Why did it change?
8. How did Norman Bowker imagine himself impressing Sally?
9. What date or day of the year does this chapter take place?
10. How did the town Norman was touring seem?
11. What was the worst part about the field? Why was this; what was the field full of?
12. What was the pity about Norman’s father?
13. Who made a strange gargling noise in the muck?
14. “He pulled hard but _______________ was gone, and then suddenly _______________, too. He could
_______________. The _______________ was _______________.”
15. “He [Norman Bowker] had been _______________ ever thought possible, but how he had not
_______________ as he _______________. The _______________ important.”
16. By the end of the chapter, how man times had Norman Bowker circled the lake?
Chapter 16
1. Who hung himself three years after “Speaking of Courage” was written?
2. What problem did Bowker describe having?
3. “It’s almost like I got killed over _______________.”
4. What does Norman think Tim O’Brien should write about?
5. “This guy wants to talk about it, but _______________.”
6. “Telling stories seemed a _______________, inevitable process, like clearing _______________.”
7. What would have happened if Tim O’Brien’s act of writing had not led him “through a swirl of memories?”
8. Where did the emotional core of “Speaking of Courage” come from?
9. “To provide a dramatic frame, I _______________ into a single _______________.”
10. What did Norman Bowker claim Tim O’Brien left out of the story?
11. “Norman did not experience a _______________ that night. He did _______________ or lose the
_______________ for valor. That part of the story is _______________.”
Chapter 17
1. Where does “In the Field” take place? What is the setting?
2. What were the eighteen soldiers’ only thoughts?
3. Who had made a mistake setting the platoon up in the “shit field?”
4. Who said, “Man, talk about irony. I bet if Kiowa was here, I bet he’d just laugh. Eating shit – it’s your classic
irony?”
5. Who gets upset with Azar and tells him, “I’m serious, man. Zip it shut?”
6. Who gets upset with Jimmy Cross about leading them “in a toilet?”
7. Who claims that it wasn’t Jimmy Cross’ fault?
8. Who did not want the responsibility of leading these men?
9. How did the boy, or young soldier, feel he murdered Kiowa?
10. Who found Kiowa?
11. What does Norman Bowker say as the men are trying to bring Kiowa out of the muck?
12. When the platoon could not get Kiowa’s body out of the muck, who sat “holding his stomach… His face was
pale?”
13. Although the soldiers felt bad for Kiowa, how else did they feel? Why?
Chapter 18
1. “Twenty years ago I watched _______________ on a trail near the village of My Khe. I did
_______________.”
2. What was guilt enough?
3. What is sometimes truer than happening truth?
4. “And now, _______________, I’m left with _______________ and faceless _______________.”
5. What can stories do?
Chapter 19
1. What did Tim O’Brien do a few months after completed “In the Field?”
2. How was the trip a birthday present to Kathleen? What did it offer her?
3. “The war was as _______________ to her [Kathleen] as _______________ to _______________.”
4. What did Tim O’Brien want to show her?
5. What had “this little field” swallowed up?
6. What did Tim put in the soft bottom of the muck?
Chapter 20
1. How many times was Tim O’Brien shot? Who was his medic the first time?
2. Who was the new medic that took Rat Kiley’s place?
3. How long did it take the new medic to get to Tim O’Brien, the second time he was shot?
4. What did Tim O’Brien almost die of?
5. What had happened to O’Brien’s butt? It was borderline ________________.
6. What shouldn’t you feel after being wounded, or shot?
7. What made O’Brien hate the new medic?
8. Where was O’Brien transferred to?
9. “There were times when I _______________ the adventure, even the _______________, of the real war out in
the boonies.”
10. What has a way of brining you “fully awake?”
11. What did O’Brien think of when he “headed down to the wire and stared out at the darkness, out where the war
was?”
12. Who came to O’Brien’s new platoon in March?
13. How did O’Brien feel? Who did he feel like? (194)
14. What did Tim O’Brien hate Bobby Jorgenson for?
15. Who did O’Brien have to get to help him with his revenge plot?
16. “You wait. Because the darkness _______________ you inside _______________, you get cut off from the
outside world, the _______________ takes over.”
17. What did O’Brien have to torture Jorgenson with?
18. “Squinting down at _______________ position, I felt a swell of immense _______________. It was a feeling
the _______________ must have.”
19. What happened at 0300 hours?
20. “He moved forward as if to _______________. Then he stopped and smiled. Almost as an afterthought, he
_______________.” Who is “he” in this passage and who is “he” doing this to?
Chapter 21
1. Where does “Night Life” take place?
2. When was the only time of day that the platoon would move?
3. “It was the purest black you could imagine, Sanders said, the kind of _______________ black that God must’ve
had in mind when he sat down to _______________.”
4. After how long did Rat Kiley start “weird talk?”
5. What did Rat Kiley say the worst thing about Vietnam was?
6. What would Rat, sometimes, do when he looked at guys who were still alive?
7. How did Rat Kiley get himself out of the war?
8. What did Jimmy Cross do for Rat Kiley?
Chapter 22
1. What can stories do?
2. What happens to the dead in stories?
3. Who was Tim O’Brien in love with at the age of nine?
4. What did Linda say to Tim after she was dead?
5. What did Linda where to school everyday?
6. What terrible thing did Nick Veenhof do to Linda?
7. Which two characters walked Linda home the day Nick did the terrible thing to Linda?
8. What did Linda die of?
9. “In a story _______________ can happen. Linda can ______________ and ________________.”
10. “I learned that words make a difference. It’s easier to cope with a _______________ than a _______________;
if it isn’t human, it doesn’t matter much if it’s _______________.”
11. How did Tim O’Brien keep the dead alive?
12. Who was waiting for Tim O’Brien in his sleep?
13. When Linda is “dead” what does she compare herself to?